From Nell Freudenberger, one of America's most dazzling talents, comes an utterly captivating cross-continental love story

This is a novel about a marriage made online. Amina Mazid is twenty-four when she leaves Bangladesh for Rochester, New York, and for George Stillman, the husband who met and wooed her through AsianEuro.com. It's a twenty-first-century romance that echoes ancient traditions - the arranged marriages of her home country. And though George falls for Amina because she doesn't "play games," each is hiding something from the other. Amina struggles to find her place in America - as a Muslim woman, an aspiring teacher, a wife with her own desires. But it is only when they put an ocean between them that Amina and George will discover whether they have a future - or if their secrets will tear them apart. Travelling from the American suburbs to the cities of South Asia, The Newlyweds is a tour de force - a novel as rich with misunderstandings as it is with unlikely connections.

NELL FREUDENBERGER is the author of the novel The Dissident, (longlisted for the Orange Prize) and the story collection Lucky Girls, winner of the PEN/Malamud Award and shortlisted for the Orange New Writers' Prize and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. She was named a New Yorker '20 Under 40' writer and one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. She has lived and taught in Bangkok and New Delhi and now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

An Arranged Marriage

1

She hadn’t heard the mailman, but Amina decided to go out and check. Just in case. If anyone saw her, they would know that there was someone in the house now during the day while George was at work. They would watch Amina hurrying coatless to the mailbox, still wearing her bedroom slippers, and would conclude that this was her home. She had come to stay.

The mailbox was new. She had ordered it herself with George’s credit card, from mailboxes.com, and she had not chosen the cheapest one. George had said that they needed something sturdy, and so Amina had turned off the Deshi part of her brain and ordered the heavy- duty rural model, in glossy black, for $90. She had not done the conversion into taka, and when it arrived, wrapped in plastic, surrounded by Styrofoam chips, and carefully tucked into its corrugated cardboard box— a box that most Americans would simply throw away but that Amina could not help storing in the basement, in a growing pile behind George’s Bowfl ex— she had taken pleasure in its size and solidity. She showed George the detachable red fl ag that you could move up or down to indicate whether you had letters for collection.

“That wasn’t even in the picture,” she told him. “It just came with it, free.”

The old mailbox had been bashed in by thugs. The fi rst time had been right after Amina arrived from Bangladesh, one Thursday night in March. George had left for work on Friday morning, but he hadn’t gotten even as far as his car when he came back through the kitchen door, uncharacteristically furious.

“Goddamn thugs. Potheads. Smoking weed and destroying private property. And the police don’t do a fucking thing.”

“Thugs are here? In Pittsford?” She couldn’t understand it, and that made him angrier.

“Thugs! Vandals. Hooligans— whatever you want to call them. Uneducated pieces of human garbage.” Then he went down to the basement to get his tools, because you had to take the mailbox off its post and repair the damage right away. If the thugs saw that you hadn’t fixed it, that was an invitation.

The flag was still raised, and when she double- checked, sticking her hand all the way into its black depths, there was only the stack of bills George had left on his way to work. The thugs did not actually steal the mail, and so her green card, which was supposed to arrive this month, would have been safe even if she could have forgotten to check. “Thugs” had a different meaning in America, and that was why she’d been confused. George had been talking about kids, troublemakers from East Rochester High, while Amina had been thinking of dacoits: bandits who haunted the highways and made it unsafe to take the bus. She had lived in Rochester six months now— long enough to know that there were no bandits on Pittsford roads at night.

American English was different from the language she’d learned at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka, but she was lucky because George corrected her and kept her from making embarrassing mistakes. Americans always went to the bathroom, never the loo. They did not live in fl ats or stow anything in the boot of the car, and under no circumstances did they ever pop outside to smoke a fag.

Maple Leaf was where she first learned to use the computer, and the computer was how she met George, a thirty- four- year-old SWM who was looking for a wife. George had explained to her that he had always wanted to get married. He had dated women in Rochester, but often found them silly, and had such a strong aversion to perfume that he couldn’t sit across the table from a woman who was wearing it. George’s cousin Kim had called him “picky,” and had suggested that he might have better luck on the Internet, where he could clarify his requirements from the beginning.

George told Amina that he had been waiting for a special connection. He was a romantic, and he didn’t want to compromise on just anyone. It wasn’t until his colleague Ed told him that he’d met his wife, Min, on AsianEuro.com that he had thought of trying that particular site. When he had received the fi rst e- mail from Amina, he said that he’d “had a feeling.” When Amina asked what had given him the feeling, he said that she was “straightforward” and that she did not play games, unlike some women he knew. Which women were those, she had asked, but George said he was talking about women he’d known a long time ago, when he was in college.

She hadn’t been testing him: she had really wanted to know, only because her own experience had been so different. She had been contacted by several men before George, and each time she’d wondered if this was the person she would marry. Once she and George had started e- mailing each other exclusively, she had wondered the same thing about him, and she’d continued wondering even after he booked the flight to Dhaka in order to meet her. She had wondered that first night when he ate with her parents at the wobbly table covered by the plasticized map of the world— which her father discreetly steadied by placing his elbow somewhere in the neighborhood of Sudan— and during the agonizing hours they had spent in the homes of their Dhaka friends and relatives, talking to each other in English while everyone sat around them and watched. It wasn’t until she was actually on the plane to Washington, D.C., wearing the University of Rochester sweatshirt he’d given her, that she had finally become convinced it was going to happen.

It was the first week of September, but the leaves were already starting to turn yellow. George said that the fall was coming early, making up for the fact that last spring had been unusually warm: a gift to Amina from the year 2005— her first in America. By the time she arrived in March most of the snow was gone, and so she had not yet experienced a real Rochester winter.

In those first weeks she had been pleased to notice that her husband had a large collection of books: biographies (Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Cary Grant, Mary Queen of Scots, John Lennon, and Napoléon) as well as classic novels by Charles Dickens, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and Jane Austen. George told Amina that he was a reader but that he couldn’t understand people who waded through all of the garbage they published these days, when it was possible to spend your whole life reading books the greatness of which had already been established.

George did have some books from his childhood, when he’d been interested in fantasy novels, especially retellings of the Arthurian legend and anything to do with dragons. There was also a book his mother had given him, 1001 Facts for Kids, which he claimed had “basically got him through the stupidity of elementary school.” In high school he had put away the 1001 Facts in favor of a game called Dungeons & Dragons, but there were now websites that served the same purpose, and George retained a storehouse of interesting tidbits that he periodically related to Amina.

“Did you know that there is an actual society made up of people who believe the earth is flat?”

“Did you know that one out of twenty people has an extra rib?”

“Did you know that most lipstick contains fish scales?”

For several weeks Amina had answered “No” to each of these questions, until she gradually understood that this was another colloquialism— perhaps more typical of her husband than of the English language— simply a way of introducing a new subject that did not demand an actual response.

“Did you know that seventy percent of men and sixty percent of women admit to having been unfaithful to their spouse, but that eighty percent of men say they would marry the same woman if they had the chance to live their lives over again?”

“What do the women say?” Amina had asked, but George’s website hadn’t cited that statistic.

George had said that they could use the money he’d been saving for a rainy day for her to begin studying at Monroe Community College next year, and as soon as her green card arrived, Amina planned to start looking for a job. She wanted to contribute to the cost of her education, even if it was just a small amount. George supported the idea of her continuing her studies, but only once she had a specific goal in mind. It wasn’t the degree that counted but what you did with it; he believed that too many Americans wasted time and money on college simply for the sake of a fancy piece of paper. And so Amina told him that she’d always dreamed of becoming a real teacher. This was not untrue, in the sense that she had hoped her tutoring jobs at home might one day lead to a more sustained and distinguished kind of work. What she didn’t mention to George was how important the U.S. college diploma would be to everyone she knew at home— a tangible symbol of what she had accomplished halfway across the world.

She asks that because you’re from someplace else, George had said. She sees brown skin and all she can think of is housecleaning or babysitting. He told her she was welcome to go to Starbucks with Annie, but under no circumstances was she to take care of Annie’s children, even for an hour. Amina was desperate to find a job, but secretly she was glad of George’s prohibition. American babies made her nervous, the way they traveled in their padded strollers, wrapped up in blankets like precious goods from UPS.

She had never worried about motherhood before, since she’d always known she would have her own mother to help her. When she and George had become serious, Amina and her parents had decided that she would do everything she could to bring them to America with her. Only once they’d arrived did she want to have her fi rst child. They’d talked their plan through again and again at home, researching the green card and citizenship requirements— determining that if all went well, it would be three years from the time she arrived before her parents could hope to join her. Just before she left, her cousin Ghaniyah had shown her an article in Femina called “After the Honeymoon,” which said that a couple remained newlyweds for a year and a day after marriage. In her case, Amina thought, the newlywed period would last three times that long, because she wouldn’t feel truly settled until her parents had arrived.

2

Theirs was the second- to- last house on the road. The road ended in an asphalt circle called a cul- de- sac, and beyond the cul- de- sac was a field of corn. That field had startled Amina when she first arrived— had made her wonder, just for a moment, if she had not been tricked (as everyone had predicted) and found herself in a sort of American village. She’d had to remind herself of the clean and modern Rochester airport and of the Pittsford Wegmans— a grocery store that was the first thing she described to her mother during their first conversation on the phone. When she asked about the field, George had explained that there were power lines that couldn’t be moved, and so no one could build a house there.

After she understood its purpose, Amina liked the cornfield, which reminded her of Haibatpur, her grandmother’s village. She had been born there. That was when the house was still a hut, with a thatched roof and a fired- dung floor. After she was born, when her parents were struggling to feed even themselves in Dhaka, they had done as many people did and sent their child back to live with her grandparents in the village. Because of a land dispute between Amina’s father and his cousins, it was her mother’s village to which they habitually returned. And so Amina had stayed with Nanu and her Parveen Aunty and Parveen’s daughter— her favorite cousin, Micki— until she was six years old. Her first memory was of climbing up the stone steps from the pond with her hand in Nanu’s, watching a funny pattern of light and dark splotches turn into a frog, holding still in the ragged shade of a coconut palm.

Her nanu had had four daughters and two sons, but both of Amina’s uncles had died too young for Amina to remember them. The elder, Khokon, had been Mukti Bahini like her father, a Freedom Fighter against the Pakistanis, while the younger one, Emdad, had stayed in the village so that her grandmother wouldn’t worry too much. Even though he was younger, it was Emdad her grandmother loved the best: that was why she’d kept him with her. When you tried to trick God that way, bad things could happen. Khokon had been killed by General Yahya’s soldiers only two weeks after he’d enlisted, but Emdad had lived long enough to marry. Her mother said that Nanu had often congratulated herself on her foresight in convincing Emdad to stay at home, and so it had been almost impossible for her to believe the news, ten years after the war had ended, that her younger son had been killed in a motorbike accident on his way to Shyamnagar, delivering prescription medicines to the family pharmacy. For months afterward, whenever people offered condolences, her grandmother would correct them:

“You’re thinking of Khokon, my elder son. He was killed in the war.”

By the time Amina was grown up, her grandmother had recovered her wits. But by then she had only daughters, and that was the reason she’d become the way she was now, very quiet and heavy, like a stone. Little by little, over the eleven months they had written to each other, Amina had told George about her life. She’d said that she came from a good family and that her parents had sacrifi ced to send her to an English medium school, but she had not exaggerated her father’s financial situation or the extent of her formal education. She’d said that she had learned to speak English at Maple Leaf International in Dhaka but that she’d been forced to drop out when she was thirteen, when her father could no longer pay the fees. She’d tried to explain that it wasn’t arriving in a rickshaw every day, when everyone else came by car or taxi, or borrowing the books other girls owned, or even working twice as hard because everyone else had a private tutor after school. What she couldn’t stand, she wrote to George, was having to leave school a few months after her thirteenth birthday, waking up in the morning and knowing that today she was falling six hours behind, tomorrow twelve, and the next day eighteen. What she couldn’t stand was all the waste.

She’d also confessed that she was twenty- four rather than twenty- three that year: her parents had waited to fi e her birth certificate, as many families did, so that she might one day have extra time to qualify for university or the civil- service exam. Her mother had warned her to be careful about what she revealed in her e- mails, but Amina found that once she got started writing, it was difficult to stop.

She told George how her father’s business plans had a tendency to fail, and how each time one of those schemes had foundered, they had lost their apartment. She told him about the year they had spent living in Tejgaon, after losing the apartment in the building called Moti Mahal, and how during that time her father had bought a single egg every day, which her mother would cook for her because Amina was still growing and needed the protein. One night, when she had tried to share the egg with her parents, dividing it up into three parts, her father had gotten so angry that he had tried to beat her (with a jump rope) and would have succeeded if her mother hadn’t come after him with the broken handle of a chicken- feather broom.

Sometimes she got so involved in remembering what had happened that she forgot about the reader on the other end, and so she was surprised when George wrote back to tell her that her story had made him cry. He could not remember crying since his hamster had died in the second grade, and he thought that it meant their connection was getting stronger. Amina wrote back immediately to apologize for making George cry and to explain that it was not a sad story but a funny one, about her parents and the silly fi ghts they sometimes had. Even if she and George didn’t always understand each other, she never felt shy about asking him questions. What level did the American second grade correspond to in the British system? What had he eaten for dinner as a child? And what, she was very curious to know, was a hamster?

It had felt wonderful to have someone to confide in, someone she could trust not to gossip. (With whom could George gossip about Amina, after all?) It was a pleasure to write about diffi cult times in the past, as long as things were better now. By the time she and George started writing to each other, Amina was supporting her parents with the money she made from her tutoring jobs through Top Talents; they were living in the apartment in Mohammadpur, and of course they had plenty to eat. She still thought the proudest moment of her life had come when she was seventeen and had returned home one day to surprise her parents with a television bought entirely out of her own earnings.

The other benefit of tutoring, one she hadn’t considered when she started out, was the use of the computers that many of the wealthy families who hired her kept for their children’s exclusive use. All of her students were female, and most of them were between eight and fourteen years old; as they got closer to the O- or A- level exams, their parents hired university students to prepare them. Many of these parents told Amina that they’d chosen her because they’d been impressed by her dedication in passing the O levels on her own, but of course Amina knew that Top Talents charged less for her than they did for an actual university student.

Amina had seen one of her students, a fourteen- year- old named Sharmila, three times a week; since her parents both had office jobs, they liked Amina to stay as long as she wanted so that their daughter wasn’t just sitting around with the servants all afternoon. Her mother confided that she thought Amina would be a good influence on her daughter’s character; Sharmila was very intelligent, but easily distracted, and was not serious enough about saying her prayers. She has been raised with everything, her mother said, her arm taking in the marble fl oors of the living room and the heavy brocade curtains on the six picture windows overlooking the black surface of Gulshan Lake, which was revealed, even at this height, to be clogged with garbage, water lilies, and the shanties of migrant families. She doesn’t even know how lucky she is. Amina nodded politely, but the way that Sharmila’s mother complained was a performance. She would put on the same show when her daughter’s marriage was being negotiated, exaggerating Sharmila’s incompetence with a simple dal or kitchuri, so that the groom’s family would understand what a little princess they were about to receive.

Amina had sworn Sharmila to secrecy on the subject of AsianEuro .com, and then they’d had a lot of fun, looking through the photos in the “male gallery” after the lessons were finished. Sharmila always chose the youngest and best- looking men; she would squeal and gasp when they came across one who was very old or very fat. More often than not, Amina had the same impulses, but she reminded herself that she was not a little girl playing a game. She was a twenty- four- year- old woman whose family’s future depended on this decision.

According to her mother, the man could not have been divorced and he certainly couldn’t have any children. He had to have a bachelor’s degree and a dependable job, and he could not drink alcohol. He could not be younger than thirty or older than forty- fi ve, and he must be willing to convert to Islam. Her mother had also insisted that Amina take off her glasses and wear a red sari she had inherited from her cousin Ghaniyah in the photograph, but once it had been taken and scanned into the computer (a great inconvenience) at the Internet café near Aunty #2’s apartment in Savar, her mother would not allow her to post it online. “Why would you want a man who was only interested in your photograph?” she demanded, and nothing Amina could say about the way the site worked would change her mind.

“The men will think you’re ugly!” Sharmila exclaimed when she heard about Amina’s mother’s stipulations. They were sitting on the rug in Sharmila’s bedroom at the time, with Sharmila’s Basic English Grammar open between them. Her student was wearing the kameez of her school uniform with a pair of pajama trousers decorated with kittens. She looked Amina up and down critically.

“Your hair is coarse, and you have an apple nose, but you aren’t ugly,” she concluded. “Now no one is going to write to you.” And although Amina had the very same fears, she had decided to pretend to agree with her mother, for the sake of Sharmila’s character. As it happened, George did not post his picture online either. They sent each other the photographs only after they had exchanged several messages. George told her that her picture was “very beautiful,” in a formal way that pleased her: it was almost as if he were a Bengali bridegroom surrounded by his relatives, approving of their choice without wanting to display too much enthusiasm, for fear of being teased. Months later, once they had decided to become exclusive and take their profi les down from the site, George told her it was the day he saw her photograph that he’d become convinced she was the right person for him— not because of how pretty she was but because she hadn’t used her “superfi cial charms” to advertise herself, the way certain American women did.

Their correspondence hadn’t been without its challenges. Normally she would go to the British Council in the mornings before her tutoring responsibilities began; since George often wrote to her at night before he went to bed, there was almost always a message waiting for her. But one afternoon a message had come when she’d happened to be at the library. It was 4:22 a.m. in Rochester (unlike most people’s, George’s e- mails always displayed the correct time), and she had been tempted to IM and say that she was online right at that moment. But when she’d read the message, she had been relieved she’d waited. She thought it was doubly disappointing to have gotten a message at a surprising time and then to have it turn out to be the message it was, startling in its curt brevity: George had been assigned a big project at work, he said, and wasn’t sure when he would be able to resume their correspondence. He hoped she understood and that she and her family continued to be well.

She had received similar messages before, and it had always meant that the man had found someone else. She remembered the way that this particular message, more than any of the others, had closed down the day— so it seemed as if there would never be anything to look forward to again. She felt as if she had failed, and when she’d arrived home and reported what had happened, her mother’s obvious disappointment had made her own even more difficult to bear. Even her father had held his tongue and kept himself from gloating about the unreliability of computerized matchmaking, and so she’d known he had been hoping this time, too.

It had been ten weeks before George had written to her again. Much later she’d wondered whether it was this hiatus that had made her fall in love with him. The message had come at the usual time, but it was even more unexpected than the last one, since she’d assumed he would never write again:

Dear Amina,

First, I should apologize for not writing for so long. I wouldn’t blame you if you’d found someone else, or were even engaged by now. (I wouldn’t blame you, but I would be very disappointed.) I promised myself I would write to you tonight and explain, but I’ve been sitting here a long time. I keep writing things and then deleting them.

It wasn’t only the work, as you probably guessed. I do have a big project (I’ll tell you about it if you’re still interested), but believe me when I say I was still thinking about you. My friends have asked how I could be serious about someone I’ve never even met, but I think in some ways we know each other better than we would if we just went on dates. Do you know what I mean? I think I’ve been worried about getting serious because I thought you might just disappear or stop writing. I know doing the same thing to you was really stupid, and I’m sorry about that. I guess what I was thinking before I stopped writing is that I’m falling in love with you. There— that’s something I wouldn’t have said if we’d been face- to- face.

Well, Amina, I’m not sure you can forgive me, but I feel better having written it. How is your grandmother’s health? Is your father working these days? And what have you been doing for the last two months? If the answer includes writing to someone else . . . that’s what I get, I guess. I know I don’t exactly deserve it, but please let me down easy.

Sincerely,

George

She had wondered if she ought to wait a day or so to write back, and then she had chastised herself for thinking about strategy. George had said that he liked her because she didn’t play games; she wouldn’t be like the women he remembered from college. If he liked her, she wanted it to be for the way she really was, and so she wrote back and told him that she hadn’t been corresponding with anyone else. She didn’t say anything about the disappointment (her own, or certainly her parents’) but simply fi lled him in on the events of the last few weeks: her father’s temporary employment at a shipping offi ce and the pain in her grandmother’s knees. Then she had printed out his note and brought it home like a gift to surprise her parents.